First some background, and the good stuff. I have been best friends with my boyfriend since 2013. We even lived together during graduate school for two years before we started dating. We started dating in 2016, when we were roommates, so we’ve been together for about 2.5 years now and have lived together for a lot of that time. We did a brief stint of long distance when we got jobs in different locations after school. In January of this year, he moved states to be with me, and I still can’t get over how amazing that was of him. We are now living together again in our own apartment and we couldn’t be happier. He is my best friend and absolutely the person I plan to spend the rest of my life with. He’s smart, funny, an absolute sweetheart and a romantic, and he makes me feel so loved every day. We have talked about our future many times and Im anticipating a proposal in the near future.
Also, he has had many female friends during our time together and this has never bothered me. I’m rarely the jealous type. He’s hung out one-on-one with girls before and I had no complaints. There has been one girl I told him I was uncomfortable with, and he stopped hanging out with her, but that was for a lot of reasons and not just because she’s a girl.
So on to the recent issue. After moving to my state, he had to pass a couple of tests in our field before he could start working. He did so and was able to secure a job in early June. He likes his new job so far, and generally likes and gets along with his coworkers, but he hadn’t really made any real “friends” yet. He’s hung out with my coworkers/sort-of friends too (I’m also pretty new to the area) and likes them as well, but no one he would hang out with one-on-one. I know he is missing having a group of friends back in his home state where he moved from.
About a month ago, maybe a little more, he started mentioning one coworker a lot. We’ll call her Liz. At first it was just in passing “Oh my coworker Liz said this or that.” It also turns out Liz used to work with an organization that works closely with my organization, so she knows a lot of people that I work with and what’s going on with my job and field of work. So it was a “small world” kind of thing, she would mention someone I knew, or something about my job, and he would tell her he also knew that person because of me – that kind of thing. But he started talking about her more and more often. I’m talking probably every single day over for a few weeks he would have a story about Liz or something that she said, so I knew they were talking or hanging out at work a lot. He did say that Liz mentioned she wanted to meet me, and she has a fiance that she lives with. So that made me feel good! Nothing to worry about, and I was happy he was making a friend here.
Liz actually lived nearby us, in a temporary place because they were moving around for her fiancé’s job. So a couple of weeks ago he tells me that Liz suggested they start carpooling to work together. Their office is about 30 minutes away without traffic – but our city always has traffic, so it’s more like 45 minutes each way most days. Honestly this made me a little uncomfortable, since this meant they would be spending 1-1.5 hours alone together in the car every time they rode together. But I didn’t say anything because they wouldn’t be carpooling every day – some days they work in the office and other days they work on projects around town, so this would only be days when they both go into the office (maybe 2-3 days a week). Besides, he only mentioned it in passing as an idea, at first. A few days later as he was headed out the door he said “okay I’m going to go pick up Liz and head into work.” I was surprised because he never told me they decided to definitely start carpooling together, but it obviously wasn’t a big deal. He has never mentioned it again so as far as I know that’s the only day they’ve ridden together, it hasn’t been an ongoing thing. I was fine with this.
Things started intensifying quickly last week, though. As I mentioned, Liz and her fiancé were in a temporary place before, so they decided to start looking for a permanent apartment. My boyfriend casually mentioned to me one day last week that they were actually interested in our building, and that they wanted to come see it the next day. This came out of left field to me. Our building is very nice, it’s a luxury building in a good area downtown, but there are also tons of similar buildings in the area. But I figured they were just checking out all kinds of places and ours was probably one of many on the list. So late last week they came by our building for a tour. I actually saw them briefly on the elevator and we met for the first time, but they were being given a tour by management so we didn’t hang out.
Well, later that night, Liz texted my boyfriend that they decided to rent in our building. I honestly didn’t know what to say because… I wasn’t thrilled. I felt like now they will definitely want to start carpooling together every day they can, and they will start becoming even closer. My boyfriend was obviously very happy about it when he told me. I just kind of asked if they were looking at any other places and why they weren’t looking any closer to where she and my boyfriend work, and he said they just really liked this building and her fiancé works more closely to our area so it works for them to live here. Obviously there was nothing I could say so I just said cool.
Ever since then I feel like they have already been talking more and more. They text and have called each other a couple of times. To be fair, as far as I know it has all been either work or apartment-related. But I also don’t really see his phone and have no idea how much they actually talk.
A couple of final things prompted me to write this post. Up until now I wasn’t thrilled about all of this but could deal with it. This weekend we traveled to visit my family for the holiday weekend. Yesterday during a family lunch, he got up and went into the other room with his phone for a few minutes. When he came back I asked “where’d you go?” and he just said “I was getting a phone call.” Later, I asked who was calling him at lunch. He said it was Liz with a few questions because they were moving in at the time. This slightly bothered me because I feel like if I hadn’t asked, he wasn’t planning to tell me it was Liz who called.
He went back to our city last night while I am staying in my hometown with my family for a couple of extra days. While driving him to the airport, I got a random thought so I asked “you’re just going to take an Uber back home, right?” (that’s how we got to the airport.) He kind of hesitated and then said “I was actually going to see if maybe Liz could pick me up, so I don’t have to spend money on an Uber.” Yet again, I felt like he never would have mentioned this to me if I hadn’t asked. Also, we live close to the airport so an Uber is not expensive, and he makes good money. I reminded him that Liz and her fiancé were moving that day and probably did not want to come pick him up at the airport (I would have said this for anyone, moving sucks), and he thought about it and agreed. He didn’t end up asking her.
I don’t know what to do from here. On one hand, I am genuinely glad he’s making a friend. There are no red flags so far, things seem 100% platonic. Plus, she has a fiancé, so we could all be couple friends! On the other hand, he seems to be getting really close to her really quickly. He talks about her constantly (a lot more than I explained in this post), they are probably going to be riding together often, and I feel like he is starting to (unconsciously or not) kind of hide some interactions with her from me.
Is it time to set boundaries? If so, what would reasonable boundaries even be? Is carpooling together too much? Is it oaky for them to hang out alone together outside of work? I have no idea and I’ve never been in this situation before. I don’t know how to talk to him about this. I just feel like we need to have a talk now that she is living in our building, but maybe I should wait and see if things escalate?
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